Big Three Stats Update

My longtime readers know that there are three statistics I like to look at to gauge a player's strengths and weaknesses.  One of them is Greens In Regulation, a universally understood stat which can be easily found at LPGA.com.  The other two are combination stats of my own design which fuse two related numbers into one.  I call them Total Driving and Total Putting.  TD combines a player's Driving Distance and Accuracy while TP combines the Putts Per GIR stat with Putting Average (total putts per round).  While writing player profiles a few years ago, I grew weary of juggling five or more numbers around trying to prove my point so I came up with these ways to reduce the clutter.

Let's say you asked me to tell you why Song-Hee Kim is having such a poor season.  I would begin by telling you that she has fallen to 43^rd in Total Putting after ranking 12^th last year.  Then I would point out that Kim has dropped from 29^th to 75^th in Total Driving.  Finally I would mention that after ranking second on Tour in GIR in 2010, Song-Hee ranks only 70^th so far this year.  At first glance, all phases of her game appear to be significantly off - which shouldn't be all that surprising, given the serious drop-off in results.  Kim has only one Top 10 in nine starts this year with two missed cuts after collecting 15 Top 10s in 22 starts with no MCs last year.

As usual with the Big Three Update, here are the Top 20 players in each category along with a link to the spreadsheet with complete listings of each:

Big Three Stats - Jun 2011

Two players made the Top 20 in all three stats and surprisingly neither of them is Cristie Kerr.  Yani Tseng and Jiyai Shin turned the trifecta while Kerr just missed it (#23 in Total Driving while Top 10 in the other two).  Several players made the top of the Driving and GIR lists - Maria Hjorth, Suzann Pettersen, Na Yeon Choi, Stacy Lewis and Mika Miyazato - while In-Kyung and Mindy Kim join Kerr as the only players to top the GIR and Putting lists.  Other than Tseng and Shin, nobody topped the Driving and Putting lists.  If you want to make your own comparisons between a player's rankings this year and last, here is a link to the 2010 final spreadsheet.

I noticed something odd while compiling the Total Driving sheet - the accuracy stats are way up this year while the distance numbers stack up about the same, which results in the highest TD numbers I've seen since 2006.  Last year's leader Karin Sjodin scored at 74.16 - there are 39 players with a higher score so far in 2011, topped by Hjorth's 78.86.  The leading distance average is only four yards longer than a year ago but the accuracy numbers (especially for the longer hitters) are shocking.  Hjorth's rate of .763 is .078 higher than her career best (since 2004, anyway) and she isn't the only bomber whose rate has jumped.  Compare the 2010/2011 accuracy numbers for Sjodin, Pettersen and Karen Stupples and you'll see what I mean.  To be clear, I don't think everybody on Tour suddenly got more accurate - obviously the courses played have had generally wider fairways than the average course last year.  For the record, the two courses that were not played in 2010 are Wildfire in Phoenix (Founders Cup) and Pacific Palms in City of Industry, CA (Kia Classic).  Note that the better driving numbers have not translated into better GIR rates (they appear even with 2010) nor better scoring averages (2011 up by a quarter of a stroke).

Back to Song-Hee Kim...if you compare her current driving distance and accuracy with last year, you'll see that she's actually added three yards and is a little more accurate this year.  Relative to the rest of the Tour, she's much worse than last year but she's actually performing about the same off the tee.  Having discovered that, I'll amend my previous diagnosis to say Song-Hee's problems stem mostly from poor iron play with the rest of blame saved for the putter.